Battles Foreign and Familial

The Honey Locust, Jeffrey Round’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo, is structured on a juxtaposition: it lays the disagreements and resentments that tear a family apart alongside the historical hatreds, political machinations and horrendous violence of war.

There is something familiar about this sort of set-up; it is the cloth from which several recent action movies have been cut. In Body of Lies, we see Russell Crowe depositing his children in the back of minivans, attending soccer games—all the while barking commands via satellite phone to Leonardo DiCaprio in an actual war zone in Africa. The Honey Locust tells a far more subtle and searching story, more intent on registering the ambivalences of familial and political situations in their full and often irresolvable complexity.

Round’s main character is Angela Thomas, a passionate and accomplished photojournalist who, when we pick up the story, is finalizing arrangements to travel to Sarajevo. It is the mid 1990s and conditions in Sarajevo, already bad, are declining rapidly. Water and power are intermittent; food is scarce. Most of the people who can afford to flee have already done so, and the rest live in almost unremitting terror. “The surrounding mountains,” the reader is told, “once among its prized scenic elements, were now the problem. They housed the Serb-backed troops holding the city hostage.” Round stages his narrative mostly through the perspective of Angela, who has a markedly broad perspective on the conflict: “Nationalities overlapped and borders were carved out, again and again, in the hands of politicians,” she observes, “until finally no one could say for sure who or what had been where … It was a land defined not by what it was or might become, but solely by what it had been: the Former Yugoslavia.”

Unlike Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, where we view the siege mostly through the eyes of those native to the city, the perspective assumed in this novel is always that of a foreigner, of someone on the outside looking in. And yet the two novels bear a marked resemblance to each other; both focus not on the historical origins of the conflict, but on the effect it has on the people who live through it.

No sooner does Angela arrive in Sarajevo than the videographer with whom she is used to working falls ill. His replacement is a young Québécois named André Riel, who is utterly unlike Angela. “His appearance disturbed her—green khakis, a scarlet headband, and a gold hoop in his left ear. He looked like a tropical bird.” Icy at first, relations between the two soon thaw and they begin trading stories about the wounds that have been inflicted on them by their respective families. André recalls the premature death of his mother; she tells him about the last time her family was assembled at their Ontario cottage—a factious, disastrous event. Sitting there with André in the bombed city, Angela realizes trauma is a kind of bond between them: “they were survivors … of something as incomprehensible as the war just outside their walls.” 

The narrative then moves back in time, to summer 1994 and the Bruce Peninsula, where the tense, explosive family gathering that preceded Angela’s departure to Sarajevo is just beginning. The setting is Angela’s family cottage, a “shared landscape” overseen by her oppressive and unstable mother, Abbie, for whom the familiarity of setting operates as a bulwark against the alarming unpredictability of the world. Also on hand are Angela’s sister Margaret (domestic and phobic, like their mother), her much younger sister Tori (an unfocused college student who annoys Angela with her facile political views), Margaret’s son, and husband (a stand-up comic), and, finally, Tori’s desirable boyfriend, Shep, who is meeting the family for the first time. It is here at the cottage we find the central metaphor of the text, the honey locust trees. “They were grand, beautiful, majestic.” Tori points out to Shep that there are three of them, one for each sister. “The one on the left is Angela’s,” she tells him. “That’s Margaret’s in the middle. The one on the right—the shortest—was planted the week I was born and it’ll still be here when I’m an old woman.”

From here the story progresses along two fronts, alternating between Angela’s life in Sarajevo and the account of the last time her family was intact and together back in Ontario. On the Sarajevo side of things, things get worse; frustrated, Angela is increasingly overcome with anger at a number of things but chiefly at the international community that, as we know, was astoundingly slow to intervene in the conflict. She loses her temper with André as well. “This isn’t Canada,” she scolds. “They don’t hold referendums over separation issues. They kill people.” Despite this outburst—perhaps because of it—Angela begins to respect and even care for André, and, before you can say lovers in a dangerous time, they are in bed together. This twist will probably not shock anyone; on the other hand, Round renders it believable, an understandable byproduct of living in a war zone—and being in a novel.

Back in Ontario Angela spars with her mother, is annoyed by the ignorance and frailty of her sisters, and gradually her family learns Angela’s two secrets: that her own marriage is ending and that she is soon to leave for Sarajevo. The decision to seek out the Sarajevo assignment, evidently, is as much to escape from the bleak realities of her personal life as it is anything else.

Round manages to keep the narrative brisk in this somewhat crowded ensemble piece and avoids caricature in his rendering of family life. We also perceive that the two situations—the war at home and the war in Bosnia—are not altogether analogous. Angela will come to learn that waiting for answers—for love—from one’s mother and father is substantively different than waiting for, say, NATO to intervene and help save the lives of thousands of people.

The end of the novel feels somewhat unresolved, as if Round wants his readers to continue asking questions the novel poses. Which is, of course, what we will do, and what we have always done, ever since Cain shocked his relatives by taking out Abel. Like the honey locust trees that shade the family cottage in such apparent perpetuity, the book of Genesis reminds us that the mysteries of familial conflict are no less perennially vexing than the question of why it is that, at certain moments in history, people feel it is somehow all right to take up arms and kill their neighbours.

But why Sarajevo? What is the fascination of this conflict, we might ask, the lure of it, for Canadian writers like Galloway and Round? There is, to be sure, a humanitarian impetus at work here, where the fictional rendering of the siege of Sarajevo provides a context for revisiting and interrogating the international community’s willingness to intervene in the conflict. “No one is coming,” says one of Galloway’s characters, “We’re here on our own, and no one’s coming to help us. Don’t you know that?” Round’s characters share that sentiment—and that anger. But what is more striking about the Canadian rendering of the war is the extent to which the siege of Sarajevo is seized as an example of a context in which the aesthetic—for Round it is Angela’s photographs; for Galloway, the cellist sawing away amidst the rubble—can operate as an engine of cultural memory, a stirring reminder of the possibility of human goodness. Is this naive, born of the perspective we get from watching the conflict on television? Or is it, perhaps, evidence of a shared cultural imagination, a particularly Canadian perspective?